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The Essays in Radical Empiricism

Chapter 1: Does 'Consciousness' Exist?[1]

'THOUGHTS' and 'things' are names for two sorts of object, which common sense will
always find contrasted and will always practically oppose to each other. Philosophy,
reflecting on the contrast, has varied in the past in her explanations of it, and may be
expected to vary in the future. At first, "spirit and matter,' 'soul and body,' stood
for a pair of equipollent substances quite on a par in weight and interest. But one day
Kant undermined the soul and brought in the transcendental ego, and ever since then the
bipolar relation has been very much off its balance. The transcendental ego seems nowadays
in rationalist quarters to stand for everything, in empiricist quarters for almost
nothing. In the hands of such writers as Schuppe, Rehmke, Natorp, Munsterberg -- at any
rate in his

(
2) earlier writings, Schubert-Soldern and others, the spiritual principle attenuates
itself to a thoroughly ghostly condition, being only a name for the fact that the
'content' of experience is known. It loses personal form and activity -- these
passing over to the content -- becomes a bare Bewusstheit or Bewusstsein
überhaupt, of which in its own right absolutely nothing can be said.

I believe that 'consciousness,' when once it has evaporated to this estate of pure
diaphaneity, is on the point of disappearing altogether. It is the name of a nonentity,
and has no right to a place among first principles. Those who still cling to it are
clinging to a mere echo, the faint rumor left behind by the disappearing 'soul' upon the
air of philosophy. During the past year, I have read a number of articles whose authors
seemed just on the point of abandoning the notion of consciousness,[2]
and substituting for it that of an absolute experience not due to two factors. But they
were not

(3) quite radical enough, not quite daring enough in their negations. For twenty years
past I have mistrusted 'consciousness' as an entity; for seven or eight years past I have
suggested its non-existence to my students, and tried to give them its pragmatic
equivalent in realities of experience. It seems tome that the hour is ripe for it to be
openly and universally discarded.

To deny plumply that 'consciousness' exists seems so absurd on the face of it -- for
undeniably 'thoughts' do exist -- that I fear some readers will follow me no farther. Let
me then immediately explain that I mean only to deny that the word stands for an entity,
but to insist most emphatically that it does stand for a function. There is, I mean, no
aboriginal stuff or quality of being,[3] contrasted with that of which
material objects are made, out of which our thoughts of them are made; but there is a
function in experience which thoughts perform, and for the performance of which this

(4) quality of being is invoked. That function is knowing. 'Consciousness'
is supposed necessary to explain the fact that things not only are, but get reported, are
known. Whoever blots out the notion of consciousness from his list of first principles
must still provide in some way for that function's being carried on.

I

My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff
or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that
stuff 'pure experience,' then knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of
relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter. The
relation itself is a part of pure experience; one of its 'terms' becomes the subject or
bearer of the knowledge, the knower,[4] the other becomes the object
known. This will need much explanation before it can be understood. The best way to

(5) get it understood is to contrast it with the alternative view; and for that we may
take the recentest alternative, that in which the evaporation of the definite
soul-substance has proceeded as far as it can go without being yet complete. If
neo-Kantism has expelled earlier forms of dualism, we shall have expelled all forms if we
are able to expel neo-Kantism in its turn.

For the thinkers I call neo-Kantian, the word consciousness to-day does no more than
signalize the fact that experience is indefeasibly dualistic in structure. It means that
not subject, not object, but object-plus-subject is the minimum that can actually be. The
subject-object distinction meanwhile is entirely different from that between mind and
matter, from that between body and soul. Souls were detachable, had separate destinies;
things could happen to them. To consciousness as such nothing can happen, for, timeless
itself, it is only a witness of happenings in time, in which it plays no part. It is, in a
word, but the logical correlative of 'content' in an Experience of which the

(6) peculiarity is that fact comes to light in it, that awareness of
content takes place. Consciousness as such is entirely impersonal -- 'self' and its
activities belong to the content. To say that I am self-conscious, or conscious of putting
forth volition, means only that certain contents, for which 'self' and 'effort of will'
are the names, are not without witness as they occur.

Thus, for these belated drinkers at the Kantian spring, we should have to admit
consciousness as an 'epistemological' necessity, even if we had no direct evidence of its
being there.

But in addition to this, we are supposed by almost every one to have an immediate
consciousness of consciousness itself. When the world of outer fact ceases to be
materially present, and we merely recall it in memory, or fancy it, the consciousness is
believed to stand out and to be felt as a kind of impalpable inner flowing, which, once
known in this sort of experience, may equally be detected in presentations of the outer
world. "The moment we try to fix our attention upon consciousness and to see what,
distinctly, it is," says a recent writer,

(7) "it seems to vanish. It seems as if we had before us a mere emptiness. When we
try to introspect the sensation of blue, all we can see is the blue; the other element is
as if it were diaphanous. Yet it can be distinguished, if we look attentively enough, and
know that there is something to look for." [6]
"Consciousness" (Bewusstheit), says another philosopher, "is inexplicable
and hardly describable, yet all conscious experiences have this in common that what we
call their content has this peculiar reference to a centre for which 'self ' is the name,
in virtue of which reference alone the content is subjectively given, or appears. . . .
While in this way consciousness, or reference to a self, is the only thing which
distinguishes a conscious content from any sort of being that might be there with no one
conscious of it, yet this only ground of the distinction defies all closer explanations.
The existence of consciousness, although it is the fundamental fact of psychology, can
indeed be laid down as certain, can be brought out by analysis, but can

(8) neither be defined nor deduced from anything but itself." [6]

'Can be brought out by analysis,' this author says. This supposes that the consciousness
is one element, moment, factor -- call it what you like -of an experience of essentially
dualistic inner constitution, from which, if you abstract the content, the consciousness
will remain revealed to its own eye. Experience, at this rate, would be much like a paint
of which the world pictures were made. Paint has a dual constitution, involving, as it
does, a menstruum [7] (oil, size or what not) and a mass of content in
the form of pigment suspended therein. We can get the pure menstruum by letting the
pigment settle, and the pure pigment by pouring off the size or oil. We operate here by
physical subtraction; and the usual view is, that by mental subtraction we can separate
the two factors of experience in an

(9) analogous way -- not isolating them entirely, but distinguishing them
enough to know that they are two.

II

Now my contention is exactly the reverse of this. Experience, I believe, has no such
inner duplicity; and the separation of it into consciousness and content comes, not by way
of subtraction, but by way of addition -- the addition, to a given concrete piece of
it, of other sets of experiences, in connection with which severally its use or function
may be of two different kinds. The paint will also serve here as an illustration. In a pot
in a paint-shop, along with other paints, it serves in its entirety as so much saleable
matter. Spread on a canvas, with other paints around it, it represents, on the contrary, a
feature in a picture and performs a spiritual function. Just SO, I maintain, does a given
undivided portion of experience, taken in one context of associates, play the part of a
knower, of a state of mind, of 'consciousness'; while in a different context the same
undivided bit of experience plays the part of a thing known, of

(10) an objective 'content.' In a word, in one group it figures as a thought, in
another group as a thing. And, since it can figure in both groups simultaneously we have
every right to speak of it as subjective and objective both at once. The dualism connoted
by such double-barrelled terms as 'experience,' ' phenomenon," 'datum," Vorfindung'
-- terms which, in philosophy at any rate, tend more and more to replace the
single-barrelled terms of 'thought' and 'thing' -- that dualism, I say, is still preserved
in this account, but reinterpreted, so that, instead of being mysterious and elusive, it
becomes verifiable and concrete. It is an affair of relations, it falls outside, not
inside, the single experience considered, and can always be particularized and defined.

The entering wedge for this more concrete way of understanding the dualism was fashioned
by Locke when he made the word 'idea' stand indifferently for thing and thought, and by
Berkeley when he said that what common sense means by realities is exactly what the
philosopher means by ideas. Neither Locke

(11) nor Berkeley thought his truth out into perfect clearness, but it seems to me that
the conception I am defending does little more than consistently carry out the 'pragmatic'
method which they were the first to use.

If the reader will take his own experiences, he will see what I mean. Let him begin with a
perceptual experience, the 'presentation,' so called, of a physical object, his actual
field of vision, the room he sits in, with the book he is reading as its centre; and let
him for the present treat this complex object in the commonsense way as being 'really'
what it seems to be, namely, a collection of physical things cut out from an environing
world of other physical things with which these physical things have actual or potential
relations. Now at the same time it is just those self-same things which his mind,
as we say, perceives; and the whole philosophy of perception from Democritus's time
downwards has been just one long wrangle over the paradox that what is evidently one
reality should be in two places at once, both in outer space and in a person's mind.
'Represent-

(12) -ative' theories of perception avoid the logical paradox, but on the other hand
they violate the reader's sense of life, which knows no intervening mental image but seems
to see the room and the book immediately just as they physically exist.

The puzzle of how the one identical room can be in two places is at bottom just the puzzle
of how one identical point can be on two lines. It can, if it be situated at their
intersection; and similarly, if the 'pure experience' of the room were a place of
intersection of two processes, which connected it with different groups of associates
respectively, it could be counted twice over, as belonging to either group, and spoken of
loosely as existing in two places, although it would remain all the time a numerically
single thing.

Well, the experience is a member of diverse processes that can be followed away from it
along entirely different lines. The one self-identical thing has so many relations to the
rest of experience that you can take it in disparate systems of association, and treat it
as

(13) belonging with opposite contexts.[8] In one of these contexts it
is your 'field of consciousness'; in another it is 'the room in which you sit,' and it
enters both contexts in its wholeness, giving no pretext for being said to attach itself
to consciousness by one of its parts or aspects, and to outer reality by another. What are
the two processes, now, into which the room-experience simultaneously enters in this way?

One of them is the reader's personal biography, the other is the history of the house of
which the room is part. The presentation, the experience, the that in short (for
until we have decided what it is it must be a mere that) is the last
term of a train of sensations, emotions, decisions, movements, classifications,
expectations, etc., ending in the present, and the first term of a series of similar
'inner' operations extending into the future, on the reader's part. On the other hand, the
very same that is the terminus ad quem of a lot of previous

(14) physical operations, carpentering, papering, furnishing, warming, etc., and the terminus
a quo of a lot of future ones. in. which it will be concerned when undergoing the
destiny of a physical room. The physical and the mental operations form curiously
incompatible groups. As a room, the experience has occupied that spot and had that
environment for thirty years. As your field of consciousness it may never have existed
until now. As a room, attention will go on to discover endless new details in it. As your
mental state merely, few new ones will emerge under attention's eye. As a room, it will
take an earthquake, or a gang of men, and in any case a certain amount of time, to destroy
it. As your subjective state, the closing of your eyes, or any instantaneous play of your
fancy will suffice. In the real world, fire will consume it. In your mind, you can let
fire play over it without effect. As an outer object, you must pay so much a month to
inhabit it. As an inner content, you may occupy it for any length of time rent-free. If,
in short, you follow it in the mental direc-

(15) -tion, taking it along with events of personal biography solely, all sorts of
things are true of it which are false, and false of it which are true if you treat it as a
real thing experienced, follow it in the physical direction, and relate it to associates
in the outer world.

III

So far, all seems plain sailing, but my thesis will probably grow less plausible to the
reader when I pass from percepts to concepts, or from the case of things presented to that
of things remote. I believe, nevertheless, that here also the same law holds good. If we
take conceptual manifolds, or memories, or fancies, they also are in their first intention
mere bits of pure experience, and, as such, are single thats which act in one
context as objects, and in another context figure as mental states. By taking them in
their first intention., I mean ignoring their relation to possible perceptual experiences
with which they may be connected, which they may lead to and terminate in, and which then
they may be supposed to 'repre-

(16) sent.' Taking them in this way first, we confine the problem to a world merely
'thoughtof' and not directly felt or seen. [9] This world, just like the
world of percepts, comes to us at first as a chaos of experiences, but lines of order soon
get traced. We find that any bit of it which we may cut out as an example is connected
with distinct groups of associates, just as our perceptual experiences are, that these
associates link themselves with it by different relations,[10] and that
one forms the inner history of a person, while the other acts as an impersonal
'objective' world, either spatial and temporal, or else merely logical or mathematical, or
otherwise 'ideal.'

The first obstacle on the part of the reader to seeing that these non-perceptual
experiences

(17) have objectivity as well as subjectivity will probably be due to the intrusion
into his mind of percepts, that third group of associates with which the
non-perceptual experiences have relations, and which, as a whole, they 'represent,'
standing to them as thoughts to things. This important function of the non-perceptual
experiences complicates the question and confuses it; for, so used are we to treat
percepts as the sole genuine realities that, unless we keep them out of the discussion, we
tend altogether to overlook the objectivity that lies in nonperceptual experiences by
themselves. We treat them,'knowing' percepts as they do, as through and through
subjective, and say that they are wholly constituted of the stuff called consciousness,
using this term now for a kind of entity, after the fashion which I am seeking to refute.[11]

Abstracting, then, from percepts altogether, what I maintain is, that any single non-per-

(18) -ceptual experience tends to get counted twice over, just as a perceptual
experience does, figuring in one context as an object or field of objects, in another as a
state of mind: and all this without the least internal self-diremption on its own part
into consciousness and content. It is all consciousness in one taking; and, in the other,
all content.

I find this objectivity of non-perceptual experiences, this complete parallelism in point
of reality between the presently felt and the remotely thought, so well set forth in a
page of Munsterberg's Grundzuge, that I will quote it as it stands.

"I may only think of my objects," says Professor Munsterberg; "yet, in
my living thought they stand before me exactly as perceived objects would do, no matter
how different the two ways of apprehending them may be in their genesis. The book here
lying on the table before me, and the book in the next room of which I think and which I
mean to get, are both in the same sense given realities for me, realities which I
acknowledge and of which I take ac-

(19) -count. If you agree that the perceptual object is not an idea within me, but that
percept and thing, as indistinguishably one, are really experienced there, outside,
you ought not to believe that the merely thought-of object is hid away inside of the
thinking subject. The object of which I think, and of whose existence I take cognizance
without letting it now work upon my senses, occupies its definite place in the outer world
as much as does the object which I directly see."

"What is true of the here and the there, is also true of the now and the then. I know
of the thing which is present and perceived, but I know also of the thing which yesterday
was but is no more, and which I only remember. Both can determine my present conduct, both
are parts of the reality of which I keep account. It is true that of much of the past I am
uncertain, just as I am uncertain of much of what is present if it be but dimly perceived.
But the interval of time does not in principle alter my relation to the object, does not
transform it from an object known into a mental state. . . .

(20) The things in the room here which I survey, and those in my distant home of which
I think, the things of this minute and those of my long-vanished boyhood, influence and
decide me alike, with a reality which my experience of them directly feels. They both make
up my real world, they make it directly, they do not have first to be introduced to me and
mediated by ideas which now and here arise within me. . . . This not-me character of my
recollections and expectations does not imply that the external objects of which I am
aware in those experiences should necessarily be there also for others. The objects of
dreamers and hallucinated persons are wholly without general validity. But even were they
centaurs and golden mountains, they still would be 'off there,' in fairy land, and not
'inside' of ourselves." [12]

This certainly is the immediate., primary, naif, or practical way of taking our
thought-of- world. Were there no perceptual world to serve as its 'reductive,' in Taine's
sense, by

(21) being 'stronger' and more genuinely 'outer' (so that the whole merely thought-of
world seems weak and inner in comparison), our world of thought would be the only world,
and would enjoy complete reality in our belief. This actually happens in our dreams, and
in our day-dreams so long as percepts do not interrupt them.

And yet, just as the seen room (to go back to our late example) is also a field of
consciousness, so the conceived or recollected room is also a state of mind; and the
doubling-up of the experience has in both cases similar grounds.

The room thought-of, namely, has many thought-of couplings with many thought-of-things.
Some of these couplings are inconstant, others are stable. In the reader's personal
history the room occupies a single date -- he saw it only once perhaps, a year ago. Of the
house's history, on the other hand, it forms a permanent ingredient. Some couplings have
the curious stubbornness, to borrow Royce's term, of fact; others show the fluidity of
fancy -- we let them come and go as we please. Grouped with

(22) the rest of its house, with the name of its town, of its owner, builder, value,
decorative plan, the room maintains a definite foothold, to which, if we try to loosen it,
it tends to return, and to reassert itself with force.[13] With these
associates, in a word, it coheres, while to other houses, other towns, other owners, etc.,
it shows no tendency to cohere at all. The two collections, first of its cohesive, and,
second, of its loose associates, inevitably come to be contrasted. We call the first
collection the system of external realities, in the midst of which the room, as 'real,'
exists; the other we call the stream of our internal thinking, in which, as a 'mental
image,' it for a moment floats.[14] The room thus again gets counted
twice over. It plays two different roles, being Gedanke and Gedachtes, the
thought-of-an-object, and the object-thought-of, both in one; and all this without paradox
or mystery, just as the same

(23) material thing may be both low and high, or small and great, or bad and good,
because of its relations to opposite parts of an environing world.

As 'subjective' we say that the experience represents; as 'objective' it is represented.
What represents and what is represented is here numerically the same; but we must remember
that no dualism of being represented and representing resides in the experience per
se. In its pure state, or when isolated., there is no selfsplitting of it into
consciousness and what the consciousness is 'of.' Its subjectivity and objectivity are
functional attributes solely, realized only when the experience is 'taken,' i. e., talked-of,
twice, considered along with its two differing contexts respectively, by a new
retrospective experience, of which that whole past complication now forms the fresh
content.

The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the 'pure' experience. It
is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet. For the time being, it
is plain, unqualified actuality, or existence, a simple that. In this

(24) naif immediacy it is of course valid; it is there, we act
upon it; and the doubling of it in retrospection into a state of mind and a reality
intended thereby, is just one of the acts. The 'state of mind,' first treated explicitly
as such in retrospection, will stand corrected or confirmed, and the retrospective
experience in its turn will get a similar treatment; but the immediate experience in its
passing is always ' truth,' [15] practical truth, something to act
on, at its own movement. If the world were then and there to go out like a candle, it
would remain truth absolute and objective, for it would be 'the last word,' would have no
critic, and no one would ever oppose the thought in it to the reality intended.[16]

I think I may now claim to have made my

(25) thesis clear. Consciousness connotes a kind of external relation, and does not
denote a special stuff or way of being. The peculiarity of our experiences, that they
not only are, but are known, which their 'conscious' quality is invoked to explain, is
better explained by their relations these relations themselves being experiences -- to one
another.

IV

Were I now to go on to treat of the knowing of perceptual by conceptual experiences, it
would again prove to be an affair of external relations. One experience would be the
knower, the other the reality known; and I could perfectly well define, without the notion
of `consciousness,' what the knowing actually and practically amounts to -leading-towards,
namely, and terminating-in percepts, through a series of transitional experiences which
the world supplies. But I will not treat of this, space being insufficient.[17]
I will rather consider

(26) a few objections that are sure to be urged against the entire theory as it stands.

V

First of all, this will be asked: "If experience has not 'conscious' existence, if
it be not partly made of 'consciousness,' of what then is it made? Matter we know, and
thought we know, and conscious content we know, but neutral and simple 'pure experience'
is something we know not at all. Say what it consists of -- for it must consist
of something -- or be willing to give it up!"

To this challenge the reply is easy. Although for fluency's sake I myself spoke early
in this article of a stuff of pure experience, I have now to say that there is no general
stuff of which experience at large is made. There are as many stuffs as there are
'natures' in the things experienced. If you ask what any one bit of pure experience is
made of, the answer is always the

(26) same: "It is made of that, of just what appears, of space, of
intensity, of flatness, brownness, heaviness, or what not." Shadworth Hodgson's
analysis here leaves nothing to be desired.[18] Experience is only a
collective name for all these sensible natures, and save for time and space (and, if you
like, for 'being') there appears no universal element of which all things are made.

VI

The next objection is more formidable, in fact it sounds quite crushing when one hears
it first.

"If it be the self-same piece of pure experience, taken twice over, that serves
now as thought and now as thing" -so the objection runs -- "how comes it that
its attributes should differ so fundamentally in the two takings. As thing, the experience
is extended; as thought, it occupies no space or place. As thing, it is red, hard, heavy;
but who ever heard

(28)of a red, hard or heavy thought? Yet even now you said that an experience is made
of just what appears, and what appears is just such adjectives. How can the one experience
in its thing-function be made of them, consist of them, carry them as its own attributes,
while in its thought-function it disowns them and attributes them elsewhere. There is a
self-contradiction here from which the radical dualism of thought and thing is the only
truth that can save us. Only if the thought is one kind of being can the adjectives exist
in it 'intentionally' (to use the scholastic term); only if the thing is another kind, can
they exist in it constitutively and energetically. No simple subject can take the same
adjectives and at one time be qualified by it, and at another time be merely 'of' it, as
of something only meant or known."

The solution insisted on by this objector, like many other common-sense solutions, grows
the less satisfactory the more one turns it in one"s mind. To begin with, are thought
and thing as heterogeneous as is commonly said?

(29)

No one denies that they have some categories in common. Their relations to time are
identical. Both, moreover, may have parts (for psychologists in general treat thoughts as
having them); and both may be complex or simple. Both are of kinds, can be compared, added
and subtracted and arranged in serial orders. All sorts of adjectives qualify our thoughts
which appear incompatible with consciousness, being as such a bare diaphaneity. For
instance, they are natural and easy, or laborious. They are beautiful, happy, intense,
interesting, wise, idiotic, focal, marginal, insipid, confused, vague, precise, rational,
casual, general, particular, and many things besides. Moreover, the chapters on
'Perception' in the psychology-books are full of facts that make for the essential
homogeneity of thought with thing. How, if 'subject' and 'object' were separated 'by the
whole diameter of being,' and had no attributes in common, could it be so hard to tell, in
a presented and recognized material object, what part comes in through the senseorgans and
what part comes 'out of one's own

(30) head'? Sensations and apperceptive ideas fuse here so intimately that you can no
more tell where one begins and the other ends, than you can tell, in those cunning
circular panoramas that have lately been exhibited, where the real foreground and the
painted canvas join together.[19]

Descartes for the first time defined thought as the absolutely unextended, and later
philosophers have accepted the description as correct. But what possible meaning has it to
say that, when we think of a foot-rule or a square yard, extension is not attributable to
our thought? Of every extended object the adequate mental picture must have all the
extension of the object itself. The difference between objective and subjective extension
is one of relation to a context solely. In the mind the various extents maintain no
necessarily stubborn order relatively to each other, while

(31) in the physical world they bound each other stably, and, added together, make the
great enveloping Unit which we believe in and call real Space. As 'outer,' they carry
themselves adversely, so to speak, to one another, exclude one another and maintain their
distances; while, as 'inner,' their order is loose, and they form a durcheinander
in which unity is lost.[20] But to argue from this that inner experience
is absolutely inextensive seems to me little short of absurd. The two worlds differ, not
by the presence or absence of extension, but by the relations of the extensions which in
both worlds exist.

Does not this case of extension now put us on the track of truth in the case of other
qualities? it does; and I am surprised that the facts should not have been noticed long
ago. Why, for example, do we call a fire hot, and water wet, and yet refuse to say that
our mental state, when it is 'of' these objects, is either wet or hot? 'Intentionally,' at
any rate, and when

(32) the mental state is a vivid image, hotness and wetness are in it just as much as
they are in the physical experience. The reason is this, that, as the general chaos of all
our experiences gets sifted, we find that there are some fires that will always burn
sticks and always warm our bodies, and that there are some waters that will always put out
fires; while there are other fires and waters that will not act at all. The general group
of experiences that act, that do not only possess their natures intrinsically, but wear
them adjectively and energetically, turn. ing them against one another, comes inevitably
to be contrasted with the group whose members, having identically the same natures, fail
to manifest them in the 'energetic' way.' [21] make for myself now an
experience of blazing fire; I place it near my body; but it does not warm me in the least.
I lay a stick upon it, and the stick either burns or remains green, as I please. I call up
water, and pour it on the fire, and absolutely no difference ensues. I account

(33) for all such facts by calling this whole train of experiences unreal, a mental
train. Mental fire is what won't burn real sticks; mental water is what won't necessarily
(though of course it may) put out even a mental fire. Mental knives may be sharp, but they
won't cut real wood. Mental triangles are pointed, but their points won't wound. With
'real' objects, on the contrary, consequences always accrue; and thus the real experiences
get sifted from the mental ones, the things from our thoughts of them, fanciful or true,
and precipitated together as the stable part of the whole experience-chaos, under the name
of the physical world. Of this our perceptual experiences are the nucleus, they being the
originally strong experiences. We add a lot of conceptual experiences to them, making
these strong also in imagination, and building out the remoter parts of the physical world
by their means; and around this core of reality the world of laxly connected fancies and
mere rhapsodical objects floats like a bank of clouds. In the clouds, all sorts of rules
are violated

(34) which in the core are kept. Extensions there can be indefinitely located; motion
there obeys no Newton's laws.

VII

There is a peculiar class of experiences to which, whether we take them as subjective or
as objective, we assign their several natures as attributes, because in both
contexts they affect their associates actively, though in neither quite as 'strongly' or
as sharply as things affect one another by their physical energies. I refer here to appreciations,
which form an ambiguous sphere of being, belonging with emotion on the one hand, and
having objective 'value' on the other, yet seeming not quite inner nor quite outer, as if
a diremption had begun but had not made itself complete.[22]

Experiences of painful objects, for example, are usually also painful experiences;
perceptions of loveliness, of ugliness, tend to pass muster as lovely or as ugly
perceptions; intuitions of the morally lofty are lofty intuitions.

(35) Sometimes the adjective wanders as if uncertain where to fix itself. Shall we
speak of seductive visions or of visions of seductive things? Of wicked desires or of
desires for wickedness? Of healthy thoughts or of thoughts of healthy objects? Of good
impulses, or of impulses towards the good? Of feelings of anger, or of angry feelings?
Both in the mind and in the thing, these natures modify their context, exclude certain
associates and determine others, have their mates and incompatibles. Yet not as stubbornly
as in the case of physical qualities, for beauty and ugliness, love and hatred, pleasant
and painful can, in certain complex experiences, coexist.

If one were to make an evolutionary construction of how a lot of originally chaotic pure
experiences became gradually differentiated into an orderly inner and outer world, the
whole theory would turn upon one's success in explaining how or why the quality of an
experience, once active, could become less so, and, from being an energetic attribute in
some cases, elsewhere lapse into the status of an

(36) inert or merely internal 'nature.' This would be the 'evolution' of the psychical
from the bosom of the physical, in which the esthetic, moral and otherwise emotional
experiences would represent a halfway stage.

VIII

But a last cry of non possumus will probably go up from many readers.
"All very pretty as a piece of ingenuity," they will say," but our
consciousness itself intuitively contradicts You. We, for our part, know that we
are conscious. We feel our thought, flowing as a life within us, in absolute
contrast with the objects which it so unremittingly escorts. We can not be faithless to
this immediate intuition. The dualism is a fundamental datum: Let no man join
what God has put asunder."

My reply to this is my last word, and I greatly grieve that to many it will sound
materialistic. I can not help that, however, for 1, too, have my intuitions and I must
obey them. Let the case be what it may in others, I am as confident as I am of anything
that, in

(37) myself, the stream of thinking (which I recognize emphatically as a phenomenon) is
only a careless name for what, when scrutinized, reveals itself to consist chiefly of the
stream of my breathing. The 'I think' which Kant said must be able to accompany all my
objects, is the 'I breathe' which actually does accompany them. There are other internal
facts besides breathing (intracephalic muscular adjustments, etc., of which I have said a
word in my larger Psychology), and these increase the assets of 'consciousness,' so far as
the latter is subject to immediate perception; [23] but breath, which was
ever the original of 'spirit,' breath moving outwards, between the glottis and the
nostrils, is, I am persuaded, the essence out of which philosophers have constructed the
entity known to them as consciousness. That entity is fictitious, while thoughts in
the concrete are fully real. But thoughts in the concrete are made of the same stuff as
things are.

I wish I might believe myself to have made

(38) that plausible in this article. In another article I shall try to make the general
notion of a world composed of pure experiences still more clear.

Notes

[Reprinted from the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods,
vol. I No. 18, September 1, 1904. For the relation between this essay and those which
follow, cf. below, pp. 53-54. ED.]

Articles by Baldwin, Ward, Bawden, King, Alexander and others. Dr. Perry is frankly over
the border.

[Similarly, there is no "activity of 'consciousness' as such." See below, pp.
170 ff., note. ED.]

In my Psychology I have tried to show that we need no knower other than the
'passing thought.' [Principles of Psychology, vol. I, pp. 338 ff.]

G. E. Moore: Mind, Vol. XII, N. S., [1903], p. 450.

Paul Natorp: Einleitung in die Psychologie, 1888, pp. 14, 112.

"Figuratively speaking, consciousness may be said to be the one universal solvent,
or menstruum, in which the different concrete kinds of psychic acts and facts are
contained, whether in concealed or in obvious form." G. T. Ladd: Psychology,
Descriptive and Explanatory, 1894, p. 30.

[For the author's recognition of "concepts as a co-ordinate realm " of
reality, cf. his Meaning of Truth, pp. 42, 195, note; A Pluralistic Universe,
pp. 339-340; Some Problems of Philosophy, pp. 50-57. 67-70;and
below. p. 16,note. Giving this view the name 'logical realism,' he remarks
elsewhere that his philosophy "may be regarded as: somewhat eccentric in its attempt
to combine logical realism with an otherwise empiricist mode of thought" (Some
Problems of Philosophy. p. 106). ED.]

Here as elsewhere the relations are of course experienced rela. tions, members
of the same originally chaotic manifold of non. perceptual experience of which the related
terms themselves are parts. [Cf. below, p. 42.]

Of the representative function of non-perceptual experience am a whole, I will say a
word in a subsequent article: it leads too far into the general theory of knowledge for
much to be said about it in a short paper like this. [Cf. below, pp. 52 ff. ]

Munsterberg; Grundzuge der Psychologie, vol. I, p. 48.

Cf. A. L. Hodder: The Adversaries of the Sceptic, pp. 94-99.

For simplicity's sake I confine my exposition to 'external' reality. But there is also
the system of ideal reality in which the room plays its part. Relations
of comparison, of classification, serial order, value, also are stubborn, assign a
definite place to the room, unlike the incoherence of its places in the mere rhapsody of
our successive thoughts. [Cf. above, p. 16.]

Note the ambiguity of this term, which is taken sometimes objectively and sometimes
subjectively.

In the Psychological Review for July [19041, Dr. R. B. Perry has published a
view of Consciousness which comes nearer to mine than any other with which I am
acquainted. At present, Dr. Perry thinks every field of experience is so much 'fact.' It
becomes 'opinion' or 'thought' only in retrospection, when a fresh experience, thinking
the same object. alters and corrects it. But the corrective experience becomes itself in
turn corrected, sad thus experience as a whole is a process in which what is objective
originally forever turns subjective. turns into our apprehension of the object. I strongly
recommend Dr. Perry's admirable article to my readers.

I have given it partial account of the matter in Mind, vol. x p. V. 1885
[reprinted in The Meaning of Truth, pp. 1-42], and in the Psychological
Review, vol. II, p. 105, 1895 [partly reprinted in The Meaning of Truth, pp. 43-501.
See also C. A. Strong's article in the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and
Scientific Methods. vol. I, p. 253, May 19, 1904. I hope myself very soon to recur to
the matter. [See below, pp. 52 ff.]

Spencer's proof of his 'Transfigured Realism' (his doctrine that there is an absolutely
non-mental reality) comes to mind as a splendid instance of the impossibility of
establishing radical heterogeneity between thought and thing. All his painfully
accumulated points of difference run gradually into their opposites, and are full of
exceptions. [Cf. Spencer; Principles of Psychology, part VII, ch. XIX.]

I speak here of the complete inner life in which the mind plays freely with its
materials. Of course the mind's free play is restricted when it seeks to copy real things
in real space.

[But there are also "mental activity trains," in which thoughts do "work
on each other." Cf. below. p. 184, note. ED.]

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